Professor Hector MacQueen and Professor Rhiannon Purdie awarded funding by RSE for joint research project
Mon 2 March 2026
Professor Hector MacQueen, Edinburgh Law School and Professor Rhiannon Purdie, University of St Andrews, have been awarded a research collaboration grant by the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE), for their project titled ‘The birth of written Scots’.
The RSE announced on 25 February 2026 that 92 exceptional research projects had been selected during the autumn 2025 Research Awards open call.
RSE Vice President, Research, Professor Anne Anderson OBE FRSE, commented: “The RSE’s Research Awards Programme plays a crucial role in supporting and strengthening Scotland’s vibrant research community. I am confident that the recipients of these prestigious RSE awards will advance knowledge and deliver meaningful benefits for Scottish society. On behalf of the Society, I warmly congratulate these outstanding researchers and their international partners, and I look forward to seeing the impact of their work.”
The project, led by Professor Purdie, focusses on the late-14th century emergence of Scots as a sophisticated language of literature, law and other fields, in the case of law first supplementing than supplanting Latin. Professor MacQueen has already written on this in chapter 7 of his 'Law and Legal Consciousness in Medieval Scotland' (Brill, 2024). He looks forward to making a law-based contribution to a multi-disciplinary project also featuring historians and literary and linguistic scholars.
Learn more about the RSE Research Awards